Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent cli­ents, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­ment­a­tion. I spent forever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stan­dalone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally settled (grudgingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­pleViewer plugin.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­tiv­ated itself without my noti­cing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­pleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an altern­ative that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­li­frey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recog­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gal­lery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­pleviewer, you were fant­astic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s important to make an entrance). In a busi­ness con­text, this prob­ably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet con­text, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I hon­estly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the news­pa­pers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elev­ator. If you com­plain about a product, its man­u­fac­turers will help you out. But most fas­cin­ating are the con­ver­sa­tions: it’s like what I ima­gine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a com­ment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of con­ver­sa­tion begin spidering off in dif­ferent tan­gents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dom­in­ates because every response is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. It’s the digital rep­res­ent­a­tion of the col­lective uncon­scious­ness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is chan­ging our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of inform­a­tion that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more cred­ible experts than I.

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Oh, come on, everyone Googles them­self at some point, don’t they? I do it mostly to see what (if any­thing) the internet has to say about me, and if any of it will come back to haunt me. I have, at times, been known to dis­close too much online.

A Google search for “sarah semark” yields this hil­ari­ously erro­neous news­paper art­icle from last year, in which my cat is actu­ally ref­er­enced as a busi­ness partner, and this sim­il­arly hil­arious and out-of-date port­folio site, which I should really take down, but I’m far too absorbed in my own per­sonal his­tory to do so.

So I’ve moved yet again and am just get­ting back on my feet. For anyone who may be inter­ested in sending me lovely things in the mail, my new address is as follows:

TRIGGERS & SPARKS GRAPHIC DESIGNS
6987 Vaughan Avenue, Hal­ifax NS
B3L 2M2

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I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

I think I really like Instapaper, when I actu­ally remember to use it. I have a tend­ency to look at some­thing long and tedious, then either book­mark it and forget about it, or print it and have my cat turn it into long-winded con­fetti. Instapaper is a really neat way of storing these “things I mean to read”, not like I need yet another form of to-do list. (My cur­rent system involves a primary hand­written list, in my note­book, which then ref­er­ences my “email to-do list”, or some­times my “rss to-do list”. Some­times one day’s list will ref­er­ence another day’s list, or a list spe­cific to a pro­ject, as in, do one item from said list, or do entirety of list.) (more…)